You probably already know that Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

There’s a lot of discussion these days in B2B marketing about whether Twitter is catching on in some industry verticals. I’m curious too, so I recently updated the Twitter account I created way back in June of ‘08.

I have just begun to tweet. At this point it matters little what I tweet, since I have a whopping list of three followers, one of whom follows me only because I follow him. And he probably follows me just out of curiosity about who is following him; after all, my line of work is not related to his—he’s a park ranger in Africa tweeting about his job protecting wild animals from poachers. (Perhaps my tweets are not as exciting as his, but if you want to follow me, my Twitter handle is “EnigmaJoy.”)

Although it’s fun to track an African ranger who is tracking animals and poachers, my main goal is to find tweets about the industries that Enigma serves: namely complex equipment aftermarket service/support and aviation MRO.  Obviously some people in our industries are on Twitter, but two questions remain: is there a groundswell of Twitter activity around the aftermarket? And would our customers and prospects follow our Tweets? While Twitter is catching on like wildfire in some industries, we don’t yet know if it would be useful for our audience.

For example, I searched on “MRO,” but so many tweets showed up in the results that it was virtually impossible to sift through them all (and precious few of the tweets were relevant to aviation MRO). In contrast, my search on “aftermarket service” yielded almost zero results.

Common sense tells me that B2B followers probably want only tweets that provide useful information. An example might be a news announcement, or comments made while attending an industry trade show.  The potential benefits are significant: surely it would be helpful to tune into the latest aftermarket news and trends, not only from some official news source or trade publication but from your peers in the industry, in almost-real time.

My colleagues and I at Enigma would like to know if our audience has hopped on the Twitter bandwagon. If one of us Enigma staffers were to start Tweeting about the aftermarket, would you listen? One way to find out is to poll our audience. So, if you don’t mind, please take a few moments to fill out this simple, four-question survey. 

I’ll publish the results in a future blog post (and on Twitter) to share what we find; stay tuned!

P.S. Wikipeida has some interesting facts about Twitter and its many uses (scroll down to see “Usage in 2009″).

Can an effective aftermarket strategy affect new product sales? I would argue that yes, indeed it can.  In my opinion one of the most overlooked and undervalued aspects of providing a first-class aftermarket environment is the strong relationship and brand recognition it enables companies to build with their customers throughout the service life of a product, which in many industries can be as long as 15-20 years.   The aftermarket provides companies with a perfect venue to make a positive impression and build customer loyalty. 

All too often the aftermarket is an afterthought; some companies don’t consider the effects a poor aftermarket experience can have on a customer’s opinion of them and their products.  Every aftermarket interaction offers a tremendous opportunity for an OEM to quickly and efficiently assist the customer and improve the customer’s perception of the organization. Yet many OEM customers experience the following scenario in trying to identify a part and complete an order:

A mission-critical piece of equipment that a customer purchased from your company goes down.  The customer needs to get the equipment running again and reviews the service information included with the equipment at the time of purchase.  But the service information is out of date, so the customer reaches out to your company to get the updated service and part information to make the necessary repairs in a timely manner. 

The customer either cannot find or decides it is too difficult to locate the part and service information as it is offered (or not offered) via the web.  So the customer calls your customer support center and is placed on hold for 15-20 minutes, waiting to speak with a customer support representative (that’s if they are calling between the hours of 8am and 5pm, when the customer support center is open.) They then sit through a 45-minute process of having the customer support representative identify and order the correct part, which might reach the customer by the following day, at best.

As you review your current aftermarket strategy ask yourself the following questions, which will give you some insight into your customers’ experience:

1. Is updated parts and service information readily available for your customers via the web?
2. Can your customers easily identify the parts they need and, via self service, place an order?
3. Are customers required to contact a customer service representative to order parts?
4. If a customer service representative is required to order parts are they available 24 x 7?
5. What is the average wait time to speak with a customer service representative?

If your company’s process is anywhere close to the process I outlined above, how eager will your customer be to purchase a new piece of equipment from your company in the future? My guess is that they won’t be very eager to do so. A bad aftermarket experience will decrease the odds that the customer will buy a new piece of equipment from that OEM; do you agree or disagree? I’d like to hear your thoughts on this, so please feel free to comment.

We all know that there is a massive wealth of knowledge that is accumulated by the shop floor engineers and mechanics—the ones who are getting their hands dirty performing the maintenance tasks day in and day out. But capturing that information has always been somewhat elusive. Whether you call it “knowledge capture,” “‘best practices” or “knowledge management,” the goal is the same: find a way to let your entire organization benefit from the know-how that exists in small pockets within your company.

Due to the difficulty we have all experienced in capturing best-practices, it is a common assumption that it must be very difficult to achieve. A holy grail that is pursued but never quite found. But in some cases, achieving this goal can be surprisingly easy.

We’ve seen a few interesting examples of equipment operators saving big, simply by offering their shop floor mechanics a chance to recommend changes to parts catalogs. The idea is quite straightforward: next to each item in an electronic parts catalog (EPC), or each task in a maintenance manual, there is a link that the user can click to initiate a change request. Each time that a mechanic sees a part listing that s/he feels should be updated with alternative parts or processes, s/he simply makes note in the change request form. Those responsible for the maintenace information review the request for technical soundness, then publish it using a one-click approval process that shares this update with all other users of the system. (Dealers can even submit change requests to the OEM so that valuable information can ripple through the entire supply chain.) These maintenance notes are always available even when an updated EPC is received from the manufacturer.  

In some ways, this is nothing new: mechanics could always request engineering changes. But the hassle involved with initiating a request usually led to the process ending before it even got started. And in the few cases when mechanics took initiative, the effort of incorporating these changes and maintaining them over time further dampened the spirit. It was almost as if someone who offered best-practices knowledge was considered a ‘troublemaker,’ which further discouraged participation.

Now, with the change requests appearing in-line within the catalogs, these troublemakers are heroes. Their know-how brings savings to the equipment operator, and makes the documentation management process even easier. Of course, the positive feedback that mechanics receive for making the effort is spurring on more participation—the knowledge just continues to flow.  And wasn’t this our goal in the first place? Letting the knowledge flow in two directions generates procedural cost savings, almost immediately.

This feature can also be taken to the next level to help with business processes such as warranty management, early warning and inventory planning. I’ll explore this further in a future uptime blog post.

Listening to the financial news these days can be very depressing.   Worldwide GDP is in decline along with worker productivity and factory orders.   With that many companies have (and rightly so) ratcheted down their corporate spending on everything from travel and personnel hiring to IT infrastructure.  However, there are signs that the economy is slowly starting to make a turn for the better; according to a recently published CNBC article, by 2010 economic activity will start to grow again. If you believe in this economic recovery theory as I do, then I would suggest that now is the time for companies to begin investing in areas that will provide them with a competitive advantage when the economy turns.

I would offer that the area with the greatest growth potential coming out of a recession is the aftermarket.  Why the aftermarket?  During the last 8 to 9 months I have had multiple conversations with companies discussing the state of their business and the economy and what many senior executives have told me is not surprising: “Not only are we not selling new equipment, but companies are not using their existing equipment” With that statement I would argue that once economic activity picks up it will be on the back of existing equipment which has set idle for many months and not new equipment purchases.  In thinking about what is generally involved in getting idled equipment ready for operations (service checks and maintenance, replacing old parts, installing updated parts and modifications, etc) I believe the aftermarket over the next 12 months can be a real growth engine for organizations that are prepared to execute.

Why are execution and an early focus in the aftermarket so critical?  For two main reasons:

1. The aftermarket will be highly competitive coming out of a recession, with companies looking for anyway to generate additional revenues.   Companies that are organized, easy to do business with and have a well thought out strategy will win.
2. Companies that start to get their “aftermarket house” in order now will get a jump on the competition, those that chose to wait will in my opinion miss the boat.

To put a highly efficient aftermarket infrastructure in place will take every bit of 6 months to a year, if organizations start investing now they will be prepared for the aftermarket wave as the economy starts to grow in 2010, those that chose a wait and see approach will be playing catch up and trying to deploy an aftermarket strategy in the middle of the aftermarket boom.

A March, 2009 press release from Lang Marketing highlights a risk facing OEMs as they downsize their dealer networks. According to Lang, “most of the more than $7 billion in 2009 parts and service sales abandoned by closing dealers (at user-price) will be captured by independent (non-dealer) service outlets and auto parts stores, as well as independent (non-OE) auto parts distributors.”

The prospect of OEMs losing $7B in revenue is a dire prediction. It implies that the remaining dealer network will fail to capture business from any former dealers—and customers will now go to PepBoys for parts and service. For OEMs, a bigger risk than PepBoys may come from former dealers that remain in operation, selling used cars and focusing on the service and parts business. These newly formed independent repair facilities (IRF) will probably avoid ordering parts from OEMs, so whether customers turn to PepBoys or former dealers, manufacturers face significant competition for parts revenue. While aftermarket carnage is possible, smart OEMs can avoid that outcome.

In this new world of automotive service, where fewer dealers support more customers, franchise holders expect OEMs to help them compete against aggressive and knowledgeable IRFs.  Former dealers will do everything possible to retain existing customers; however, being dropped by an OEM probably doesn’t help their business.  These newly formed independent repair facilities will lose some of the specialized knowledge they had when they were franchise dealers, especially for the newest models of cars.  The remaining dealers may be able to gain an advantage through access to OEM service and parts information and supply chains.  With OEM assistance, in the form of more accurate and timely information and more streamlined parts processes, franchise dealerships can capture a greater share of the parts and service market.

Beyond acquiring individual car owners, franchise dealers can benefit by developing business relationships with smaller, local service shops that had been served by former dealers—supplying them with OEM-branded parts like a warehouse.  Capturing “orphaned” service shops will be extremely profitable for dealers because some components are only available through an OEM franchise.  Since delivering the right parts quickly is a major advantage with IRFs, those OEMs that simplify and accelerate their dealer’s parts procurement will go a long way toward ensuring success in the aftermarket.

In previous blog posts I have discussed ways for OEMs to capture more aftermarket business by making life easier for customers and dealers.  OEMs that help dealers improve customer service and support will be the ones best positioned to mitigate a $7B risk.

Other Enigma posts on improving aftermarket business:

• How Fewer Dealers Can Sell More Parts
• Simplifying Parts Sales: Make It Easy For the Customer
• Seven Steps to a Highly Effective Aftermarket
• OEMs and Aftermarket Parts: A Bigger Piece or A Bigger Pie?
• Improving Aftermarket Share

Manufacturing companies trying to expand their aftermarket parts and service business must grapple with a problem that is unknown to most of their executives—the issue of old (or poor quality) product information. (i.e. maintenance manuals, service bulletins, technical specs, parts catalogs, etc.) Any customer with machines more than five years old is, in all likelihood, making maintenance decisions based on outdated paper documentation—or the electronic equivalent, scanned PDF.  Customers running old equipment will eventually rely on old information.

There are billions of machines in use throughout the world that fit that description, and service and parts decisions are being made for them based on old information. Modern authoring tools with robust data formats, like XML, may help future generations of technicians, but OEMs that want to improve aftermarket revenues must find a way to use yesterday’s service information to help today’s mechanics and parts managers. That means getting parts and service information that’s in an old format on-line, tying it into parts ordering systems and then updating and maintaining this information for the future.

Before they begin, OEMs must clearly define their aftermarket business objectives because decisions about cleansing, converting or re-using old data can have significant implications. In fact, for anyone trying to improve aftermarket profits, the cost of making their old data usable is probably the biggest unknown expense they will face. Poor data decisions can easily double the time and money needed to implement a new aftermarket initiative.

For instance, if service information is in paper format there is really no other option than to scan it into an electronic format. But what then? Should the company take the next step and use optical character recognition (OCR) to convert the scanned document into a true, text-based format? If so, what level of conversion accuracy is required? (Accuracy requirements will vary by industry and be driven by the risk of potential errors—in terms of money and safety.) If OCR is deemed too expensive, perhaps metadata or searchable keywords can be added into the file header or the properties of the new electronic document. (This may be a manual process or it may involve OCR, but on a more limited scale and therefore with far greater accuracy.) But what types of metadata/keywords are most useful to aftermarket business activities? What about non-textual information like graphics, schematics and illustrations; or parts lists, calibration and inspection tables? The answers to these questions, and more, will have a significant influence on the time and cost of getting the aftermarket solution up-and-running.

Of course, if the OEM has source documents in an electronic format, so much the better. In fact, it is reasonable to assume that any document printed in the last 20 years was created on some type of electronic authoring tool. Since electronic data will provide much better quality than scanning and OCR the question then becomes how to obtain the original files? And what about any revisions  and ongoing updates/modifications?

When trying to improve aftermarket revenues, there are a large number of data issues that deserve thoughtful consideration. Because of Enigma’s vast experience serving the aviation, automotive, oil & gas, rail, defense, utilities and high-tech industries, we are well positioned to provide you with insight and solutions to even the most difficult data problems. The key to success in the aftermarket is cleansing old data to drive new business.

In a recent survey of manufacturing executives, 54% of companies say that maintenance retirements will cost them more than $10MM over the next five years. And 31% estimated the cost at more than $50MM. According to Stephanie Neal’s article in Managing Automation magazine, OEMs can’t afford to make new capital investments, yet “businesses need to run at peak performance levels…Meanwhile, baby boomers are retiring, leaving a gap in the number of skilled professionals who understand MRO operations.”

These numbers are a major concern for OEMs because equipment downtime has a negative impact on business. And we’re hearing a similar message from other capital equipment operators like airlines, rail & transit, and oil & gas. Maintenance capability is critical to keeping equipment in-service, generating revenue and profits.

In the same issue of Managing Automation, David Brousell’s article identifies the top 3 business goals for 2009 as:

1. Reduce Inventory
2. Improve Customer Service
3. Reduce Downtime. 

While it may not be obvious at first, these three objectives and the retirement problem share a common characteristic: success relies on improving access to parts and service information. Current maintenance improvement strategies that focus on enterprise asset management or supply chain management (EAM/ALM/CMMS and SCM/SPP) fall short because they lack the detailed aftermarket information necessary to fully address these opportunities and problems. (See a previous blog post on this topic.) Traditional systems can track performance, schedule maintenance and balance inventory but they don’t address the problem of improving service—both scheduled and unscheduled maintenance activities.

With the number of experienced mechanics decreasing and the demands for productivity increasing, how will companies keep equipment running? Some are simply outsourcing maintenance to a 3^rd party, essentially buying a “best-in-class” maintenance organization. The problem with this approach is that recurring costs are bound to increase as the company’s first-hand knowledge regarding equipment maintenance decreases.

Another approach is to enhance in-house maintenance by implementing a one-stop-shop for all parts and service information—including the collective experience of the maintenance department—for your equipment. This allows existing service departments to become more efficient and more consistent in delivering maintenance and support, and helps new technicians perform like old-timers. This approach also helps companies to contain escalating maintenance costs, ensuring they retain control over uptime and output.

Implementing a one-stop-shop approach does more for companies than just improve maintenance training, reduce equipment downtime and improve customer service. (Although that may well be enough.) It also helps reduce inventory by ensuring correct parts orders and by providing real-time demand information from the point-of-service to the supply chain management system, allowing more accurate parts forecasts.

Companies that operate capital equipment face a dilemma. They need to get more production out of existing equipment with limited resources—both human and financial. Solving this problem is a big decision. On the one hand companies can outsource maintenance, but once that decision is put in motion it becomes difficult to reverse. On the other hand they can use available technology to improve the in-house maintenance and thereby keep their options open. To my way of thinking, in an uncertain world flexibility is a commodity that is hard to replace and one that I am reluctant to lose.

Snapp is looking at the aftermarket problem from a slightly different angle than I am. However, we both see tremendous opportunities to reduce the cost and complexity of buying service parts. Following our advice would allow OEMs to optimize inventory and improve customer support. So where Snapp is focused on accelerating the order-to-delivery process, Enigma focuses on accelerating the parts identification and ordering process. Interestingly, Snapp’s story reveals the impact of both issues because at first he couldn’t figure out the right part number to order and then he discovered the part was only available through a dealer. (I asked Snapp about his experience and he told me that he still hasn’t bought the part.)

The fact is these problems are two sides of the same coin—service parts procurement. Traditional part sites seem to miss the fact that buying a service part is different from buying a t-shirt or book. For a car, truck or bulldozer there are many interrelationships between components, which means that determining the right service parts to order requires an understanding of the equipment make, model, trim package (optional components) and model year. Often this requires a detailed understanding of how to decode the VIN (vehicle identification number) or serial number of the product. (Not an easy task given there are over 250M vehicles on the road in the US and they may date back to the 1980s.) Furthermore, service information like maintenance manuals and service bulletins must often be consulted to understand the latest service and parts recommendations (and these often apply only to a sub-set of all equipment). As a result, I’m not surprised that Snapp couldn’t find what he wanted on eBay and I understand his frustration with the parts sites. They should be up to the job, especially the OEM sites, but most of them are not. As a result, the entire part buying process can be painful.

One of our customers told us that, prior to implementing Enigma, parts orders could take as much as 45 minutes to complete. As a further example, here is Snapp’s first-hand account from his blog:

“When looking through the websites of dealers, it was absolutely maddening to try to navigate them. Most the sites are caught in a time warp and exhibit the worst of web navigation and design. Some of them ask for contact information so they can treat the desire to purchase parts as a ‘lead’… Why does Honda allow dealers, who lack the interest or size to develop competent transactional websites to sell auto-parts on-line? Why are Honda, and other major manufacturers, not managing this with a single website and a national network…And especially when a customer wants to order a part, there is absolutely no reason they should have to [use] a dealer to do so.”

This brings me back to the Dealer Parts Hub. Enigma is just one piece of the overall DPH footprint. But if the experience of Snapp is any guide, Enigma is the critical piece for improving customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. The key to improving aftermarket parts sales is simplifying the parts identification and ordering process.  The time is right for ideas like DPH to be implemented and bear fruit.

There’s an interesting article by Michael Lam in Overhaul & Maintenance Magazine titled, “The Curious Case of the Irreproducible Result: Demystifying No Fault Found.” (A No Fault Found is an equipment problem reported during ordinary operations that can’t be traced to a specific cause and can’t be reproduced in a controlled environment.) Although written for an aviation audience, this article offers a good overview for any industry trying to reduce the number of No Fault Found (NFF) events.

NFFs are particularly disturbing because they result in so much waste. When a component is replaced unnecessarily, someone must pay for the new part, for the actual service, for scrapping or repairing the old component (and any associated shipping charges), for replenishing inventory, and for the subsequent repair and downtime when the equipment must be fixed a second (or third, or fourth) time. When a component is mis-diagnosed on a plane, train or automobile (or any other piece of complex equipment), it sets off a series of events that impact customer satisfaction, maintenance productivity, and inventory control, all of which harm revenue and profits.

In the aviation industry, 30% of reported faults can’t be reproduced; and, if you focus on avionics—which represent 75% of all aviation NFFs—the number of problems that can’t be reproduced jumps to 50%. The reason, according to Lam, is “the collision of an irresistible force—the ever-increasing sophistication and complexity of aircraft technology (the dense workings of the components themselves, the size and intricacy of the software programs that govern them, and the proliferating interrelationships among various systems and sub-systems)—with an immovable object: the commercial pressures that cap the time available to line maintenance technicians for troubleshooting.” Do dump trucks, locomotives, and control valves experience similar NFF problems? Given the complexity of this equipment, the advanced electronics and automation that is being added, and the harsh environments in which they operate, it would be logical to say “yes”.

Even the incorporation of advanced (and integrated) diagnostics has not solved the NFF problem. Lam says, “Technicians cannot rely on automated test equipment to do their thinking for them. As the NFF rate shows, they’re not sufficiently reliable. The best corrective is a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms and their interconnections.” In other words, the answer to reducing No Fault Found events is not more automation but rather better information. The article advocates that companies adopt a holistic approach to diagnostics, fault isolation and resolution—all of which is predicated on a more complete understanding of the equipment and the operating environment.

I agree with Lam’s assessment and Enigma has always stressed the importance of providing complete and relevant information to maintenance planners, engineers and parts managers. Whether it’s parts catalogs, service manuals or proprietary maintenance techniques, Enigma supplies all the information necessary to accelerate troubleshooting, streamline repairs and improve maintenance quality.  For further reading on aviation NFFs, please see ARINC Report 431: No Fault Found - A Case Study and ARINC Report 672: Guidelines for the Reduction of No Fault Found. No Fault Found is a critically important topic for any company with aftermarket operations; therefore I will post more information as I find it.

Chrysler wants to close 25% of its dealerships (almost 800) taking the total number down to about 2400. GM wants to close 40% of its dealerships to get down to about 3,600. These decisions reflect the fact that car sales are dropping from about 10M annually to about 7M and are forcing the manufacturers to re-think many aspects of their business model: revenue, costs, volume and profits.

After removing almost 3,200 dealers, how can manufacturers increase revenue, decrease costs and increase volume and profits? This question must weigh heavily on the minds of OEM executive teams. (I don’t mean to be insensitive because certainly the OEMs are concerned for the welfare of those dealers and staff that have been eliminated, but they must also focus on rescuing the larger business and limiting the financial damage to themselves and the remaining dealers.) With people buying fewer cars, one area that is ripe for OEM growth is aftermarket parts, which is one of the most profitable pieces of the business.

Aftermarket parts—often called service parts—are the parts sold to support the roughly 250M registered vehicles currently on the road in America (136M of those vehicles are passenger cars.) What is interesting is that the OEMs only have about 10% share of the aftermarket. (See previous blog post: OEMs and aftermarket parts—a bigger piece or a bigger pie.) Two of the questions that probably come up for a VP of Parts are, “After losing 3,200 parts desks, what is the best way to sell parts to the car owners who relied on that dealership? And, “Is it possible to increase service parts volume with fewer dealers?”  I believe there are encouraging answers for both questions. It may be time for OEMs to consider a new parts strategy that I call the Dealer Parts Hub (DPH).

DPH is a fairly straightforward concept. Allow customers (dealers, independent repair facilities (IRF), do-it-yourself mechanics) to easily identify and order required parts and service documents directly from the OEM’s website. Then, send the customer to the appropriate dealership to pick up their parts (or add it to the dealership’s regularly scheduled parts delivery).

Certainly there are complications for the OEMs and the dealers that must be addressed; however, none of them are insurmountable. For instance, it is important to find a way compensate the OEM for sharing their intellectual property—parts and service information. Also, the DPH solution must steer customers to the appropriate dealer, especially when an agreement exists between dealers and IRFs to supply OEM parts. Finally, the DPH solution will need visibility into available inventory at each dealer to ensure that service parts are waiting when the customer arrives. There are other issues as well but we know the technology exists to make the Dealer Parts Hub a reality.

Automotive OEMs and dealers are trying hard to return to profitability. Enigma believes we have part of the solution. Future posts will explore in greater detail the requirements, opportunities and benefits of the Dealer Parts Hub strategy.

I recently returned from MRO Americas, where I spent some time walking the exhibit hall, listening to various presentations and serving on a speaking panel, “Regulatory Compliance in the Digital Age.”  Here are a few observations from my time in Dallas: the show was busier than I expected, despite the economy; airline concerns regarding the aging MRO workforce are increasing; although my speaking panel was the last one of the entire show it was very well attended. From this I reached the following conclusions:

1. MRO remains a critical priority for airlines (no surprise there)
2. Airlines don’t know who will be fixing their airplanes in the future (or how they will be trained)
3. Airlines want the FAA to give clear guidance and help resolve the significant issues that arise when implementing digital systems

Since this panel was the last topic before attendees left to go home, the Q&A session was informal. Nevertheless, we were surrounded by people asking questions about how to achieve a truly efficient, and compliant, digital MRO environment. The airlines made it clear that they need the FAA to synchronize maintenance regulations with current IT capabilities. Furthermore, they expect the FAA to focus on more than just the airframe and engine OEMs, looking also to the airlines, MRO shops and technology suppliers for input. Airlines want FAA regulations that synchronize safety, maintenance and data standards so that they can be protected from being forced into rigid single-provider systems. (The issue of data standards is very important to airlines as they try to avoid OEM-only systems that may limit their flexibility for procuring parts and service.)

Despite years of IT investment, today’s reality is that airplanes are still being fixed with paper documentation. The result is that after one or two years it is nearly impossible for a maintenance planner to understand an airplane’s service history. It is no wonder that planning organizations take months to properly schedule fleet maintenance and must still repeatedly revise the plan throughout the year.

Paperwork is the bane of our industry, not regulation but literally paperwork. Anyone that has ever been forced to sit on a plane, on the tarmac, waiting for the paperwork to be completed knows exactly what I mean.

The Obama administration is a huge advocate of e-government, green initiatives and consumer safety. These are all issues that the MRO industry embraces. With help from the FAA digital MRO can become a reality, which will improve maintenance operations, simplify safety compliance and accelerate AD (Airworthiness Directive) adoption.

In future blog posts I will speak more on this subject and address some of the preconceived notions that exist around aircraft MRO and the technology that supports it.

The April 20, 2009 issue of BusinessWeek includes innovation survey data compiled by Boston Consulting Group. The survey data makes it clear that companies across the board are reducing innovation related to new products and services. The BW/BCG poll indicates that companies have become very conservative when it comes to innovation. (Does this surprise anyone?)  However, the data also indicates that companies are increasing incremental innovations for existing products and services—this includes minor changes and cost reductions.

In fact the print version of the magazine says, “More companies also are emphasizing minor changes to existing products and cutting production costs than in the previous two years. The upside: Corporations are more satisfied than in the past with the financial return on their innovation investments, suggesting they’ve scaled back to funding prospects with a shorter-term payoff.”

The survey results reinforce a previous blog post on innovation, where we suggested that improvements to existing products and services are very attractive in recessionary markets. This type of incremental innovation doesn’t have to be explained to customers because they already understand the product or service, therefore promoting new features is reduced to simply answering the question of whether the new feature does a job better, faster and/or cheaper.  In the aftermarket, OEMs, customers, distributors and field technicians all recognize the value of accelerating equipment repairs and streamlining parts orders.

This leads me to ask a simple question, “Which of your products and services can most benefit from incremental innovations that deliver higher revenues and/or lower costs?” For OEMs, each company may have a different list of possible projects, but improving aftermarket sales and service should show up somewhere for all of them.

Why invest resources now towards improving aftermarket processes? Two reasons:

1. In good economic times or bad, the aftermarket is one of the most profitable parts of any OEM business model.
2. In a recession, like today, companies aren’t buying new equipment; rather they are trying to get the most out of what they already own.

The common perception of the aftermarket involves high costs and serious competition. While the competition is extreme, the cost doesn’t have to be. (Some of these issues are addressed in a recent webinar by Enigma and Oracle.)  For short-term payoff, it makes sense for OEMs to invest in an aftermarket parts and service application that will not only reduce the cost of their aftermarket operations, but also increase their aftermarket sales and improve their customer satisfaction.

Following up on an earlier blog post titled “OEMs and aftermarket parts—a bigger piece or a bigger pie,” I wanted to mention a blog post by Carlisle & Company titled “Recession Busters and Low Hanging Fruit.” The article points out that there are some pretty straightforward steps that OEMs can take to increase market share for aftermarket parts and service.

According to Carlisle & Company, “…take it as a fact: customers go to your websites to learn about service and parts. Next, regardless what segment you are in, what’s important to customers of service and parts? We’ve really nailed this one over the past several years: (1) trust, (2) value, (3) cost, and (4) convenience. That’s pretty much it. Next, what’s important to the OEMs? (5) High service retention. Finally, what’s important to connecting these five things together? (6) Ease and (7) Innovation. It has to be easy for customers to get relevant information … or they will rely on other information sources and common opinions from their cousin Goober.”

If Carlisle is correct, and our experience shows that they are, then OEMs clearly have the ability to increase revenues by developing a highly effective aftermarket. Let’s look at each of the seven steps listed by Carlisle:

1. Trust – Customer trust for the OEM, and for the dealer, requires consistency. Ensuring that service and parts are consistently diagnosed, repaired and/or delivered builds trust.
2. Value – Value is measured by the customer. The right balance of price, performance and quality creates good value.
3. Cost – Cost, as a competitive differentiator, is sometimes overestimated but if trust and value haven’t been established then price becomes a major factor.
4. Convenience – Convenience may be associated with value, but it’s different. Customers will pay more for things of similar value based solely on convenience. 
5. High service retention – High service retention, or repeat business, is the direct result of OEMs and dealers providing trust, value, cost and convenience.
6. Ease – Ease of access to relevant information is the key to tying together steps 1-5. OEMs know it but they don’t always know how to achieve it.
7. Innovation – Innovation is required to achieve each step, and is currently lacking from the approach of many OEMs and software vendors. The key is to focus less on the IT department and more on the line-of-business and its customers, dealers and distributors.

To innovate, and make it easy to order parts and perform service, OEMs must leverage their intellectual property with a dynamic, online/offline electronic parts catalog (EPC). Since OEMs are the ones with  the most accurate service and parts information, their EPC should always be up-to-date, which would pave the way for  establishing trust. As long as cost is set “close enough,” dealers can leverage the convenience of a one-stop-shop of service and parts information to consistently deliver quality and performance, which will establish real value in the mind of the customer. This ultimately leads to high service retention, which benefits both the OEM and the dealer/distributor.

For me, the most important words in that Carlisle quote are “ease” and “innovation.” When Enigma talks to customers, dealers and distributors, without a doubt the number one request we hear is, “please make it easier to work with the OEM.” What they mean is that they want fast, accurate, integrated aftermarket systems that help them identify and order the correct parts and then quickly perform the right service. The seven steps towards aftermarket success are spelled out; now OEMs have to take them.

Next week Enigma’s CEO, Jonathan Yaron, will be participating in a speaking panel, “Regulatory Compliance in the Digital Age,”  at MRO Americas. The panel will be discussing the future of regulatory compliance for aviation maintenance, with a particular focus on the role of industry standards and technology. Joining him will be Carol Giles, Manager of the Aircraft Maintenance Division of the Federal Aviation Administration. The panel will be moderated by Mark Yerger, Vice President of Engineering for Federal Express.

Jonathan’s presentation will address how information technology has evolved to affect all aspects of aircraft maintenance, from technical publications to digital sign-offs on job cards. His premise is that many regulations were written with the assumption that aircraft maintenance information would be printed, distributed and approved using paper. Now that airlines and MRO shops are embracing the latest technology solutions, all parties—the OEMs, airlines, MRO shops, IT vendors and the FAA—need to agree on how to assure compliance while reaping the benefits of the technology.

A friend of mine once said, “The great thing about standards is that there are so many of them.” While this is a great sound bite, in this case it is not true. With regard to managing, publishing and transmitting aircraft maintenance data there are only a few standards to worry about. So why do so many airlines and MRO shops still rely on paper? There are a few reasons:

1. There are multiple ways of interpreting the standards. (To some people, a standard with multiple interpretations is the same as no standard at all.)
2. Airlines and MROs are trying to implement IT strategies without considering how to share maintenance data between systems and between organizations/partners.
3. Airlines and MROs are nervous about investing in modern systems because they are afraid they won’t be approved by the FAA. (Many airlines are currently relying on home-grown or highly customized maintenance systems that are more than 10-years old!)

Of course all of these reasons are really just excuses that overlook the real source of the problem—poor/ inconsistent data. Not surprisingly, it’s the data, stupid.  The aircraft OEMs are inconsistent in their adherence to specific content standards, closely following some standards and sometimes…not so much. When airlines modify the maintenance content they do the same thing. (In both cases this is usually a matter of expediency, valuing a quick and dirty fix over long-term quality.)

Airlines and MROs find themselves caught in the middle of wanting to become fast and efficient while wrestling with bad data. (Putting crap into the new system results in crap coming out.) Unless all the airlines and MROs are willing to select identical maintenance systems there needs to be a different answer. (Of course, all airlines operate differently so they will never agree on standard functionality, never mind the desired advanced capabilities and integrations.) Enigma has ways to deal with bad data and help airlines automate their maintenance systems, however there are other pieces of the maintenance puzzle that are not so flexible. That is what Jonathan will be discussing next week.

For airlines to achieve maintenance Nirvana the problem of data quality must be addressed. Only then will airlines be able to eliminate the recurring delays caused while someone manually transcribes paper work records into the maintenance management system for tracking, approval and retention. We hope to see you at MRO Americas so that you can hear first hand what Jonathan has to say on this topic. 

Following up on an earlier blog post where we talked about “Getting a Bigger Piece of the Aftermarket Pie,”  we found more support for our viewpoint in a recent blog post by Carlisle & Company titled “The Future of OEM-Dealer Business Model for Wholesaling Mechanical Parts to Independent.”

According to the Carlisle & Company blog, “Based on the latest AIAA data, the market for mechanical and maintenance parts outside the dealer service shop is estimated to be over $60 billion (at wholesale prices), which is HUGE. OEMs and dealers maintain only a fractional share of this market – maybe 10%, but probably much less. This means if dealers could grow their already miniscule wholesale mechanical part sales by 25% (2.5 points of share) this would be worth an incremental $1.5 billion in part sales.  The problem, however, is that many dealers are simply neither equipped nor engaged in a way to support the requirements of independent repair facility business owners…”

In other words, independent repair facilities (IRFs) are a vast reservoir of aftermarket parts revenues; why don’t OEMs and dealers have a bigger piece of that market?

Carlisle & Company has several noteworthy things to say but for the sake of brevity I’ll focus on the four that seem most relevant.

1) Auto parts stores (like O-Reilly, Autozone, Advance Auto, and NAPA) far outshine OEMs when it comes to providing parts to IRFs in a timely fashion.  More than just parts however, they also provide help to shop technicians when they have problems repairing vehicles. It’s no wonder that IRFs frequently turn to an Autozone rather than the OEM or a dealer.

This is ironic, because OEMs are actually in the best position to provide accurate parts and service information. Dealers that have up-to-date catalog and technical data could become an integral player in the service parts value chain. The OEMs and dealers have an established distribution network that would enable dealers to dramatically improve IRF support, and by extension market share. All that is required is for the OEMs and their dealers to have the right mindset to capitalize on it.

2) Successful OEMs provide financial and non-financial support to help their dealers increase wholesale parts sales. Carlisle & Company wrote: “The fundamental dilemma for OEMs is how to meet the installer needs using their existing dealer channel. Although there are dealers who have been successful at wholesaling parts, an average dealer lacks the capabilities and mindset to support the independent repair shops and grow the business.”

We’d add that the non-financial support should include an effective electronic parts catalog (EPC) that would enable dealers to more easily provide service and parts information to the IRFs. It’s understandable that some dealers view IRFs as competition, especially since dealer profit margins are typically higher on service than on parts. However, the volume side of the equation can skew the revenue and profit numbers dramatically. One dealer I know has a wholesale parts business that covers a 70-mile radius. He supplies a lot of IRFs in that territory and the volume of parts that flow through those service bays dwarfs his own service parts business—as long as he gives them the level of support they expect.

3) It’s essential to make it easy for IRFs to locate and order parts. We agree, and as we said in the “Putting e-Business to Work” blog the best way to do that is to provide an accurate EPC that integrates seamlessly with e-business, and inventory management systems.

Giving parts managers the ability to quickly find the exact information they need—based on VIN, model and/or trim package—including relevant service bulletins and part supercessions is critically important. Giving them the ability to then order those parts with one mouse click can change the way they approach all of customer support.

4) IRFs care about more than price, they also care about the quality of service they receive from an OEM dealer. We believe that the more accurate the parts and service data (i.e., a catalog that has the most recent updates), the happier the IRF will be. Furthermore, a fully-integrated EPC feeds parts demand information into complex back-office systems that calculate appropriate stocking levels and locations, ensuring that the right parts are always in the right place when required by an IRF or dealer.
 
Smart OEMs are already making such changes to capture a bigger piece of the aftermarket pie. Now they need to expand the pie by helping dealers to see IRFs as their most valuable customers. 

The April 6, 2009 issue of BusinessWeek includes an article by Dean Foust that lists the fifty best companies in the S&P 500—the BusinessWeek 50. The list was developed by measuring various financial criteria for each company as compared to their peers in the same industry sector. (The idea was to identify the best companies rather than the hottest industries.)

To Foust, what stands out is that these companies “created products or services dramatically better and cheaper than anything offered by rivals” and “changed the rules of engagement in their industries.” The author references a 2002 McKinsey survey and clearly advocates for innovation, concluding that “recessions are historically times when companies make the biggest competitive strides—or fall behind.” The challenge however, is to know which innovations a company should fund.  (This is an even greater challenge in recessionary times, when ROI is watched most closely.)

It is important not to confuse the words invention and innovation—invention implies something never seen before, whereas innovation implies something improved. In difficult markets, innovation trumps invention because the improved product/service doesn’t have to be explained to customers—they already recognize it and must only evaluate whether it does the job better, faster and/or cheaper.  Therefore, the innovations that deserve to be funded are those that are quickly understood and embraced by customers.

In the aftermarket industry, the owners, distributors and mechanics of complex machinery already understand the value of maintenance manuals, service bulletins and parts catalogs. What’s new and innovative is that they now have the ability to instantly find all the information they need, thanks to integrated electronic parts catalogs. Aftermarket service and support—whether for aviation, automotive, military, agriculture, or oil and gas—has now evolved beyond reliance on paper-based service information (although the ability to print relevant content remains important in certain situations). 

Historically, it took a lot of time and energy to gather, distribute and update parts and service data to the field.  Now, modern technology provides the tools necessary to automate this task, so that tech pubs, service and support become faster and more accurate—allowing up-to-date service information to be delivered via the Web, wireless and/or DVD. 

Historically, customers, technicians and parts managers had to search multiple locations and databases, perhaps placing several phone calls and faxes, to get the information and parts needed to fix equipment. Now, they can quickly find the information and instantly order the required tools and parts to complete the job—improving the speed and accuracy of service and support as well.

To deliver such information is not a new invention; OEMs have always provided aftermarket information. Rather, this is a matter of innovation. Providing integrated electronic parts catalogs and service information has a two-fold benefit—lower cost and greater speed for the OEM and better customer support for parts and service; now that’s innovation that is quickly understood and easily embraced.

On August 6, 2005 a Tuninter ATR-72 aircraft attempted a water landing off the coast of Sicily and sixteen people died (23 survived). An Italian tribunal recently handed down seven convictions for this accident on charges ranging up to, and including, manslaughter and air disaster (Tuninter Pilots, COO, Technicians Convicted).  Those found guilty include the two pilots, the chief operating officer, the maintenance chief and three technicians.

The cause of the crash was ultimately traced back to a maintenance error. During maintenance on Aug 5, the Fuel Quantity Indicator (FQI) on this aircraft was replaced. Unfortunately, the maintenance technicians used a FQI designed for an ATR-42 rather than an ATR-72 (according to Aviation Safety Network). While this particular FQI must have fit properly (after all it seems to have passed at least a visual inspection), it was designed to measure fuel quantity for a smaller aircraft. Because each model aircraft has a uniquely shaped fuel tank, the FQI that was installed indicated about 2000 Kgs more fuel than was actually on-board. (The pilots would have thought they had over 700 gallons more fuel than they actually did.) Predictably, on the longest leg of its next flight this aircraft ran out of fuel, resulting in significant loss of life.

Regardless of which industry you talk about, the wrong parts get put onto equipment all the time.  While engineers try to “Murphy-proof” components to avoid mis-assembly, it isn’t always possible (for a variety of reasons). It’s possible that the maintenance technicians did not know there were different FQIs for each aircraft but it’s likely that the maintenance manuals did. In fact, there was probably even a way to test the FQI to make sure it was operating properly. 

When servicing complex machines, it’s critical to have accurate maintenance information. Fortunately modern IT solutions are available that provide accurate, updated service information.  This isn’t just about getting the latest service bulletins and revisions; it’s also about filtering out any information that isn’t relevant to the specific piece of equipment and type of service being performed.

Did the maintenance technicians from Tuninter have accurate information that clearly indicated the appropriate part number? Without thoroughly researching the court case, it would be unfair to reach any conclusions about the cause of this specific mistake. However, it is reasonable to ask how similar errors might be prevented in the future.

This tragedy points out that poor maintenance can carry a high cost. The value of the lives lost can’t be measured. The cost of replacing this aircraft exceeds $15M (new). And the cost to the airline’s reputation will only be known over time. Hindsight, they say, is 20-20. I’m sure the technicians responsible for maintaining this aircraft wish they could have a do-over but unfortunately, that’s not possible.

Maintenance planning and execution is an imperfect science that tries to balance risk and cost. Accurate parts and service information is critical to achieving that balance. It is the starting point for reducing mean-time-to-repair, improving first-time-fix-rate and increasing mean-time-between-failures. Without accurate data, maintenance technicians may be forced to rely on their “best-guess”, which too often is not good enough.

Airlines often have the challenge of adapting OEM data to meet their own maintenance requirements. One type of adaptation is called a Customer Originated Change (COC). Although it requires significant effort to manage COCs, it is usually worth the effort. COCs are derived from airline-specific business processes and experience, and are helpful in capturing and sharing best-practices and knowledge that is acquired over time. But some airlines have been tempted to change the actual data model of the documentation that was received from the OEM.  This can increase costs, in unexpected ways.

Airlines receive a parts catalog and a maintenance manual in SGML/XML format from aircraft manufacturers, structured according to aviation industry standards (the ATA DTDs). Many airlines decide to transform this data structure to simplify their own publishing process, usually with only minor changes.

For example, an aircraft’s printed parts catalog contains a PNR table at the end, listing each part number numerically—similar to an index. This concept exists in the XML data as well and allows for attributes of each part to be listed in one location, instead of repeated throughout the body of the document each time the part is referenced.

When publishing the XML data (whether to paper, or electronically), this structure requires a more complex stylesheet, because the attribute data is often not sitting exactly at the location that it needs to appear. To reduce stylesheet complexity, some airlines may perform a transformation, copying and inserting this attribute content throughout the textual area of the main body (PCDATA inside the tag).

The immediate result seems wonderful: A faster transformation during the publishing process, with a stylesheet that is easier to create. However, the long term consequences far outweigh these benefits.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, the airline is also making COCs – changing content in the document according to their own specific needs. An example of a common COC would be if the airline’s engineering team decided to use an alternate part from an approved spare parts manufacturer (but there are many other reasons as well).

Using the PNR example and a modified data model, if an engineer wanted to update a part number s/he must now do so in multiple locations throughout the parts catalog, instead of just once within the PNR index.  This is only a minor problem—search and replace can do the trick—but the real headache, and the real cost to the airline, comes as a result of the ongoing cost for managing these COCs.

Every three months, the OEM sends an updated version of the parts catalog. It is the airline’s responsibility to reconcile all the COCs with the new OEM revision, so that all the best-practices knowledge is re-incorporated. The COC comparison can be a massive resource drain on airline engineering teams, sometimes resulting in a six month delay in adopting new data. (Enigma 3C Revision Manager can dramatically reduce the pain of reconciling OEM revisions and COCs, but that doesn’t alleviate the underlying issue.) During this delay, new efficiencies are not being adopted, and in the worst case, regulatory mandates must be tracked and implemented manually. 

Sometimes it’s easier for an airline to just generate a new COC. The innocent data transformation that made the publishing process ‘more efficient’ has resulted in many more COCs being required, with the associated review and approval process as well. I’ve seen cases where an airline had eight times as many COCs as a result of this type of modification.

The lesson learned is that data models are very sensitive to change. Often, the original DTDs do not seem to make sense so the temptation to make a simple change can be overwhelming. Airlines need to resist the temptation, as the long-term costs will usually far outweigh the short-term benefits. A second lesson is that airlines should seek publishing platforms that can handle complex DTDs—with strong stylesheet engines—and that include intelligent COC and revision management capabilities.

A recent story on National Public Radio highlights a trend that we’re hearing about a lot lately: manufacturers have drastically reduced their production of new cars (logically, because they are not selling as many), while sales of aftermarket parts are dramatically increasing. Along with that, the average age of the American car is on the rise: it’s now 9.4 years. People are getting their cars fixed, rather than buying new. That reflects what we’re seeing in other manufacturing sectors as well, customers are repairing, rather than replacing, what they already have.

For OEMs, whether they make planes, trains or automobiles, it means that there is money to be made in the aftermarket side of the business. Easy, right?  One would think so. However, Carlisle & Company (an independent research and consulting firm) estimates that OEMs usually control only about 40% of the service parts business. The other 60% is controlled by competitors who sell common parts, those components that are not engineered exclusively by the OEM.

Customer satisfaction with service information and parts data is one of the factors that drives market share in the aftermarket.  Each percentage increase in customer satisfaction with the OEM’s aftermarket support data equates to a percentage increase in market share for parts and service.

How can OEMs increase customer satisfaction? There are three ways:

1) Make sure customers (usually dealerships and distributors) have the latest service and parts information. If an OEM does not provide accurate, up-to-date support information, the customer will look elsewhere to buy the parts. Quite often, OEM catalogs don’t contain the latest information; either because they’ve outsourced their parts catalog development to a third party or their in-house catalog creation and update processes are too time consuming. Either scenario results in the service and parts information being about 45 days out-of-date.

2) Make it easy for customers to find and order service parts. OEMs that provide a streamlined/automated approach to part identification and ordering capture more business because they are improving their customer’s business as well. This requires powerful searching and filtering tools to identify the right parts and procedures and an integrated, robust shopping cart. Also, customers must be guided to the proper part choices including: part supercession, installation kits and any special tools. This environment must integrate with back-end ERP and e-commerce systems, to streamline customer’s access to part purchasing, pricing and inventory data.

3) Provide a complete product, parts and service environment that incorporates all ancillary information such as technical specifications, troubleshooting, service bulletins, wiring diagrams and part lists, as well as pricing and availability. When customers have a one-stop-shop for all aftermarket information they have no reason to look elsewhere for help.

The bottom line is, to increase your aftermarket parts sales and market share, studies have shown that you have to increase customer satisfaction with your aftermarket parts and support data. Providing easy access to up-to-date parts and service information is the best place to start.

With much of the world in recession, industries that rely on capital equipment—like oil & gas, aviation and construction—are buying less new equipment these days. As OEMs sell fewer new units, they have shifted their focus to selling more spare parts.

OEMs are seizing this opportunity because profit margins on aftermarket parts and service are higher than on new equipment. Typically, parts and service make up only 25% of an organization’s total revenue, but they often represent as much as 75% of profit.

The problem is that most of these companies capture less than half of their potential aftermarket parts and service business. Many businesses are using inefficient manual processes to manage thousands of parts and the related maintenance and repair information. For example, customers must often call the OEM to figure out the right part number(s) and pricing, which can take as much as 45 minutes. As if this isn’t bad enough, the customer must then enter this information onto the proper form and fax it back to the OEM, where it is re-entered into the order management system.

Such a cumbersome process leads to misorders, shipping errors, inventory problems and delays that ultimately increases equipment downtime. It also means higher staffing costs for both the OEM and the customer.

What does it take to address these issues? An accurate and up-to-date electronic parts catalog, such as Enigma InService EPC, which (1) simplifies part identification; (2) provides relevant service data; and (3) integrates with e-commerce systems like Oracle, SAP and IBM.

In a typical scenario, customers use InService EPC to quickly identify the correct parts/kits and specific quantities. Items to be ordered are added to a pick list and passed, through a SOAP-based interface, to the order management system, which validates, submits, schedules and tracks the order for fulfillment. Integration between the parts catalog and e-commerce systems reduces the cost of ownership and improves ROI for the manufacturer. It also enhances the customer’s experience, which has been proven to increase aftermarket part sales.

Enigma InService EPC extends the OEM’s IT enterprise—from product development through complete aftermarket support. By providing open, standards-based interfaces, Enigma makes enterprise integration simple, so that companies can meet today’s challenges and tomorrow’s opportunities.

Companies that manufacture complex equipment are starting to invest in e-business solutions to help sell aftermarket parts. These are products like Oracle E-Business Suite, SAP mySAP Business Suite and IBM WebSphere Commerce. When linked to ERP, CRM and other supply chain systems, e-commerce products can significantly improve order management and order processing. They can check a customer’s credit, verify product availability, apply customer discounts, track order status and payment, and so on—all of which are important elements of the customer’s experience.

Yet while these e-commerce products decrease order processing costs, our experience indicates that they don’t really increase revenues. Why not?

One reason may be that, when it comes to selling parts online, ordering a part is not the same as selecting a part. Order management systems are not designed to help customers figure out what to order, so in reality they only solve half the problem. If a parts manager, field technician or end-customer doesn’t have parts and service information handy, he/she is likely to 1) spend too much time looking for the right part number, or 2) order multiple parts in the hope that one of them will work.

For a service technician to find a part, he may need to start with assembly diagrams, or troubleshooting instructions, and “drill down” to pinpoint the right item(s). By linking the parts catalog to the relevant service documentation, with interactive assembly drawings and integrated service bulletins and maintenance notes, it becomes much easier to find the proper parts quickly.  If it is too difficult and time-consuming to find the right part, assembly or kit, the customer or parts manager is likely to look elsewhere to buy their parts.

OEMs can increase aftermarket profits by making it simple to find and buy parts and service information. For distributors, this means they can quickly serve their customers while also reducing mean-time-to-repair (MTTR), increasing first-time-fix-rate (FTFR) and decreasing the number of mis-ordered parts.

To maximize ROI, a parts catalog must be designed to support equipment with complex maintenance requirements and multiple configurations/dependencies. It must integrate seamlessly with an OEM’s e-commerce and back-office investments and extend certain aspects of these enterprise applications to distributors and customers. Enigma InService EPC is such a product, and is proven to minimize the cost of ownership and add value to key IT investments. 

For OEMs trying to figure out how to get more from an e-business strategy, an electronic parts catalog should be a key component.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I recently attended the MRO Middle East conference. I particularly like aviation conferences because, unlike in some other industries, the common aim of safety leads companies that would otherwise be mortal enemies to freely exchange ideas and enter into lively debate.
 
At this conference I particularly enjoyed the sessions on Lean and Six Sigma.  There was some good debate on Lean (as a stand-alone initiative) and Lean plus Six Sigma.  Some panel members suggested that Lean will reduce waste (in this context, waste = time) but the result will simply be that more maintenance problems are discovered in less time.  On the other hand, these panel members argued that the combination of Lean and Six Sigma will not only reduce waste but also improve performance (meaning consistent service and reliability).  The panel agreed to disagree and I personally think there are merits in both approaches but I believe it’s a blend of Lean and Six Sigma that will best support the aviation industry going forward.

Another subject, PMA parts, seems to be on the agenda at every MRO conference these days.  If I understand correctly, there are over 100,000 PMA parts in use so it’s no wonder there’s a great deal of interest.  There seemed to be some skepticism regarding the ability of PMA parts to deliver savings to an airline.  A voice from the audience said they did not think the savings were as great as the presenters believed.  And the biggest concern expressed by one of the airlines was whether or not an aircraft would be accepted at fair value when it came off lease.  The worry that lease companies will not accept PMA parts seems to be valid.  I conclude that although there is an increase in PMA part usage, the industry has yet to really make up its mind about the wide and complete acceptance of PMA parts.  Certainly the OEMs seem to be stoking the fires against PMA parts and so the debate continues.

A couple of weeks ago I made the trip to Dubai to attend the MRO Middle East conference.  I went there to understand more about a region that still has GDP growth and, more importantly, is not cancelling/ deferring orders for aircraft.

Considering that this was the first MRO Middle East conference sponsored by Aviation Week, it was well attended. The show seemed to be about the same size as MRO Asia, with the usual companies exhibiting: Boeing, Airbus, SRT, MTU, ADAT, and Iberia (easily 100+ exhibitors).  The conference sessions held about 150 to 200 people, however, the exhibition area seemed to have a lot of people milling around who were not attending the conference sessions. I guess there may have been 200 more people just looking around the exhibition area on the first day.  There appeared to be a good spread of people from Middle East, India and Africa.

It’s not surprising this conference had a healthy turnout, because
1) This was the first-ever MRO Aviation Week conference in the Middle East, with MRO Europe, Asia and North America well established.
2) MRO (and aviation overall) is “hot” in this corner of the globe.

If you want some stats to support the assertion that the MRO industry is booming in the Middle East, here’s a snippet from the Aviation Industry Group: 

“The Middle East MRO industry will see steady growth of 4.4 per cent and reach $3.4bn by 2018 as compared to $2.8bn in 2008, according to industry experts. This year, the global MRO will be down between four per cent and eight per cent from 2008 as airlines have generally reduced capacity worldwide, particularly in North America and West Europe, said Chris Doan, president and CEO of Team SAI.”

The conference sessions had some really interesting topics.  Most opened with market data, first for the region and then a global picture.  I was surprised by the number of aircraft flowing into the region over the next few years, Emirates are still taking delivery of 2 new aircraft a month, and Qatar, Etihad and flyDubai have huge expansion plans.  It is expected that the combined fleet size will grow from 700 today to 1100 within the next 10 years, with a large percentage of that growth in the wide-body types. 

Now for the real interesting question; who’s going to do all the heavy maintenance?  Even with the reduced maintenance requirements of new aircraft there is still a significant growth demand.  Some good things appear to be happening around the ADAT & RR joint venture, the relationship with SR Technic and companies like JorAMco – all are looking to expand their 3rd party business.  However, demand still exceeds capacity and true engine shops are in short supply.  It sounds like the biggest hurdle is going to be finding the staff and then retaining them. Interesting times!

I’ll have more on this conference for next week’s blog…

My team and I just got back a few days ago from Interlog Winter 2009, a conference that’s focused on the aftermarket parts and logistics business for automotive, industrial and aerospace manufacturers.  I was pleased to discover that attendees wanted to do more than soak up the sun on Marco Island, Florida (the Sunshine State) and casually browse the booths; most were on a mission to find better ways to improve their corporate bottom line.

The agenda was full of great presentations on a wide range of topics related to customer service, inventory, logistics, outsourcing, procurement and electronic parts catalogs. Of all the messages delivered during the conference, I noticed two major themes:

1. Increased parts sales depend on improving customer satisfaction and dealer relationships
2. There are innovative ways to get more with less in today’s challenging economy

I believe Enigma’s InService EPC (electronic parts catalog) application assists customers in both areas.

First, we’re seeing that companies are renewing their focus on aftermarket parts and service as a way to improve customer/dealer relations. Simplifying business transactions is an easy way for OEMs to gain a competitive advantage for aftermarket parts sales. InService EPC strengthens the OEM-customer/dealer relationship by providing the most recent and relevant parts information at the point of need, and by streamlining part selection and order processes. OEMs that invest in aftermarket technologies (like Enigma) show that they care about the success of their customers/dealers and are positioning themselves to reap the rewards of a long-term relationship.

Second, InService EPC not only improves business transactions but also streamlines and automates internal processes such as catalog creation, update and distribution. So while InService EPC helps increase part sales, it also reduces the cost of catalog production.

Despite—or perhaps because of—the down economy, companies are willing to invest in technology as long as it improves revenue and/or reduces costs (preferably both).  I guess that’s why we had so much traffic at our demo booth! If you missed Interlog Winter, I recommend you put it on your calendar for next year.

When evaluating the benefits of different maintenance information systems, features are often measured against increased efficiency. And of course, this is an important goal: Allowing engineers and technicians to work faster translates immediately into higher uptime and lower costs. But sometimes, features go beyond the tactical benefit of worker efficiency, by adding strategic operational savings to the picture. Effectivity is one of those features that provides both tactical and strategic benefits.

One reason for Enigma’s leadership in the aerospace and manufacturing aftermarket is that all of the products include effectivity filtering. I had always seen this as a tactical feature that helps workers consistently perform more efficiently. But I’ve now discovered that effectivity also provides a strategic advantage, by improving and automating key aspects of maintenance planning, parts purchasing and inventory management.

Before describing these benefits, let me give a brief overview of effectivity…
Complex equipment—like planes, trains and automobiles—is typically designed as a single model and then adapted to meet various customer requirements. Each customization, or option package, does not usually warrant a completely new set of manuals—most of the content remains the same, with just a few special instructions and optional parts. For the sake of efficiency, the OEM’s tech pubs department will often maintain a single source document and simply mark the content that changes, according to the specific equipment model or serial number. For example (using an imaginary data schema):

<task effect=’ALL’>
     <step effect=’ALL’>Remove the locking bolt.</step>
     <step effect=’ALL’>Insert the protective gasket, part #
         <part effect=’V10,V15,V17’>A43-3819</part>
         <part effect=’V18,V22’ >A44-4481</part>
         <part effect=’OTHER’>A40-1055</part>
     </step>
</task>

This is a very simple example that describes the concept of effectivity. With really complex equipment, effectivity often applies to large portions of text, and in some cases can even be nested, with subtasks split according to the equipment model, and then specific part data within that subtask split further according to each serial number.

When publishing to paper, effectivity requirements are typically listed in the footer of each page, and are also listed as a lead-in to specific paragraphs or parts list items that are effectivity-specific. Although sometimes confusing, this format may be sufficient for mechanics with the proper training. However, electronic delivery can eliminate this confusion by filtering out any content that is not relevant to the specific machine being serviced, allowing technicians to focus only on the content that matters.

I’ve had the chance to see a few electronic systems that did not filter according to effectivity, rather they simply mimicked the paper-publishing model of headers and lead-ins. Unfortunately, treating electronic delivery like paper does not always work, and the customer results were less than stellar.

I was astounded to discover that because mechanics could not be sure of the specific part that was needed (for the serial number being serviced) they would often order every possible part! They might take three or more parts to service one piece of equipment and figure out which one was correct out in the field. The other parts would then, hopefully, be returned.

It’s hard to even measure the additional costs incurred by this process:

• ‘Lost’ parts, that are not properly returned
• Cash-flow that is tied up in lengthy return material procedures (RMA)
• Inventory purchases made to replace parts that weren’t needed in the first place
• Wasted shipping, stocking and logistics costs

Maintenance information systems that use effectivity filtering eliminate this problem. Not only does effectivity provide strategic benefits—operational savings across multiple departments—but also tactical benefits—faster, more accurate maintenance.

Effectivity filtering increases manitenance productivity and reduces parts and inventory costs. Now, that’s what I call effective.

The aftermarket is not immune to the current economic climate; the slowdown in the automotive sector, for example, is obvious and understandable. But the fact that aftermarket trade shows and conferences such as InterlogWinter and Service Parts Inventory Management & Reverse Logistics Summit are still going strong is a good sign that companies see the importance of the aftermarket to their bottom line.

InterlogWinter, the leading conference for the aerospace, automotive and heavy equipment industry, will be held next week, with approximately 200 attendees. (In case you’re wondering, yes, Enigma will be there, at Booth #13). The agenda is robust, with presentations from companies like Cummins, Pratt & Whitney, and Briggs and Stratton, on topics such as “Multiple Moving Targets: Servicing Different Products At Various Stages In Their Life Cycles To Deliver Top Notch After Market Service.”   

The Service Parts Inventory Management & Reverse Logistics Summit is now in its third year, and growing, with an agenda that includes presentations such as “Improving Business Relationships and Customer Support by Streamlining Service Parts into an Online Catalog.”

Even in an economic downturn, companies want to invest in technology that will increase efficiency and cut costs. In the manufacturing aftermarket, most OEMs want to improve relationships with their dealer networks by making it easier for their dealers to do business with them; to do otherwise would be to miss revenue opportunities.

What we are hearing from our customers and prospects is that they cannot afford to keep doing business as is; they need the latest technology solutions to keep pace not only with their competition but with customer expectations. 

We are hearing that outsourcing an online catalog to a third party is just not cost-effective anymore, because it costs more than keeping it in-house, and it takes too long to send out catalog updates to their dealer network. 

We are seeing that most companies have e-commerce systems, such as Oracle iStore, in place to facilitate parts ordering; but those companies are now seeing the value of integrating their e-commerce system with a compatible electronic parts catalog.

Recessions come and go. But the need to do more, better—to compete—never goes away.

During a recent conversation with Joe Barkai of IDC Manufacturing Insights, he mentioned that he’s often asked about improving MTTR and FTFR but rarely MTBF. (For those of you that have forgotten your maintenance acronyms: MTTR is mean-time-to-repair, FTFR is first-time-fix-rate and MTBF is mean-time-between-failure.)

It seems that the natural inclination of many service departments is to focus on quickly getting equipment back in service, with less concern for proper equipment maintenance and calibration. During a break-fix event (unscheduled maintenance) this is a rational response: the equipment is down, revenue generation has stopped, so get the machines working again. However, even during scheduled service events mechanics can become overly focused on speed. This is an example of reacting to the urgent rather than resolving the important. The problem is that service departments are often measured more on productivity than on quality.

Looking at each of these acronyms: MTTR is all about fixing stuff faster, which requires streamlining repair processes; FTFR seems like it’s about quality but is really more about accurate diagnosis, which takes us back to productivity again; However, MTBF is all about how long equipment continues to function properly.

For example, when the wheels on a car are aligned there is a certain range of adjustment that qualifies as “straight.” That range is the tolerance of the alignment. If the mechanic adjusts the wheels so that they’re barely within tolerance, then one small pothole can knock the wheels out of alignment again. However, if the mechanic is diligent about centering the wheels in the tolerance zone then it may take several potholes before the steering needs another adjustment. In this case, the length of time between wheel alignments is the mean-time-between-failure.

As you can imagine, focusing on MTBF can have a negative impact on MTTR but that can happen when any measurement criteria gets too much emphasis. In future blog posts we plan to take this discussion deeper, and talk about some of the challenges and solutions for keeping these three service measurements properly aligned.

With all the projections of gloom and doom for the coming year, one area we’re not hearing about very much is aftermarket parts and service. Perhaps that’s because the economic downturn has a smaller effect on the aftermarket than it does on manufacturing. The reason is pretty obvious; the wear and tear of normal equipment operations guarantees a need for parts and maintenance. This need never goes away as long as the equipment is in service. So unless customers stop using existing equipment altogether, which can happen, there will continue to be a market for service and parts.

It’s true that in certain industries, and certain regions, some of the equipment is being mothballed. In many industries, new equipment purchases are being delayed. However, most companies are simply finding ways to continue existing operations with the equipment they already own. These companies have an urgent need to operate their equipment more efficiently—improving uptime, reducing mean-time-between-failures (MTBF) and improving mean-time-to-repair (MTTR). The only way to accomplish this, with existing equipment, is to improve the processes associated with parts and service. And that means improving IT, for both the manufacturer and the operator.

A TechWeb Research Report in the print version of the Nov 24 Information Week  (”The Road Ahead: Tough Times Call for Strategic IT”) says: “An unintended consequence of the global economic problems is that they may further elevate the strategic role of IT in organizations, as the business looks to its technology platforms and processes to help drive efficiencies that save money and accelerate business activities that can have an impact on customer loyalty.” (The full report is available for registration here.) 

For instance, under normal circumstances an automotive OEM gets less than 5% of corporate revenue from spare parts sales but those same sales provide more than 30% of corporate profits. With the decrease in car sales what must that picture look like now? And how much better would it be if the OEMs could position themselves to compete more effectively against Pep Boys, AutoZone and NAPA? Many manufacturers are now trying to find out by implementing advanced parts and service systems to support their customers and dealers.

The economy may be bad but companies are still running their equipment. Enigma’s job is to help manufacturers and operators support that equipment, with software that simplifies the work of mechanics, technicians and parts managers. The result is a more efficient aftermarket with lower costs and higher profits for all involved.

On December 9, 2007 the Uptime blog went live. Since then we have been posting stories almost weekly (this is the 50th post) about the state of affairs in aftermarket service and support. You, our readership, has grown significantly in the first 12 months and what started as an experiment in Social Media has now become an important channel of communication for Enigma. Our intent has been to reveal the often overlooked business opportunities hiding within the aftermarket. Hopefully we’ve succeeded.

If you read the blog to get a better understanding of current aftermarket business issues, that’s fantastic, and I encourage you to share your thoughts by posting an occasional comment. If you’re a software developer trying to get a competitive edge on Enigma, that’s OK too I guess. You can chime in with your thoughts and maybe we’ll post it (LOL).

Overall, I’m very pleased with how the blog has developed throughout the year and I would like to say several “thank yous.”

1. To you, the readers, for your patience and understanding as this blog has ramped up. If you like the blog I encourage you to share it with a friend. 
2. To all of the contributors for your thoughtful ideas, material and complete posts. Please keep them coming because without you, this blog would be very bland indeed.
3. To Joy Reo for hounding me, gathering the text and graphics, and managing all the other details of writing, editing, publishing, and monitoring the blog and blog traffic. Without you, the Uptime blog wouldn’t exist.

Thank you all.

Moving into 2009 we plan to go even deeper into parts and service issues surrounding automotive, heavy equipment, aviation, rail, energy and any other industry that relies on complex equipment with challenging service requirements. I hope we can share this information in a way that makes it easy to understand and meaningful to every industry we serve. We also plan to spend more time discussing the role of information delivery within the aftermarket ecosystem of telematics/ autonomics, diagnostics, fault isolation/troubleshooting, scheduling, inventory/ logistics, ERP, and content authoring/management.

As always, we ask for your input. Please tell us how the Uptime blog can be improved and become more meaningful to your business. Thanks again for a great 2008! See you in 2009!

An article in the November 2008 issue of Managing Automation focuses on the recent progress and future plans of Wonderware—a maker of operations management software and a division of Invensys. It was not the type of article I would normally read, after all it was focused on manufacturing execution and I gravitate more toward aftermarket maintenance. However, one phrase in the title of the article caught my eye—”Empowering Plant Operators.”

The idea of empowering workers is at the heart of Enigma’s solutions and so I thought maybe this would be an interesting read. What I learned was that Sudipta Bhattacharya, President of Wonderware, is a man after my own heart. Here’s what he said, “The gap today in industry is that we don’t empower the production worker…We need to enable the first-line operator to take action. Give a person the tools to make the right decision and you can drive the next step-change in efficiency.”

Here’s a guy that “gets it.” Most workers, whether line operators or service technicians, want to do their jobs right but they often lack the necessary information. While Wonderware is primarily concerned with improving manufacturing operations, Battacharya’s comment applies to aftermarket maintenance as well. Which leads me to the point of this post; as we enter 2009 if your company is not pursuing aftermarket parts and service improvements, why not? Chances are your manufacturing floor and supply chain is already well down the road to improving efficiency and decreasing costs. Why not tech pubs, customer support, parts and service?  Bhattacharya is absolutely right, “We need to enable the first-line operator to take action.”

I once saw one of our customers write the following note on the back of a PowerPoint slide, “Enigma = Aftermarket Experts.”  What are you doing to improve your service and support? If you would like to talk about how to unlock your aftermarket, reducing costs and generating revenue, give me a call. I’d be happy to show you ways to do both.

During this week’s Air Transport World webinar on Strategies for Unscheduled Aircraft Maintenance, a good question came in from an audience member, and I feel it deserves your attention. The questioner was asking about where to focus the time and energy of the maintenance department and his question highlights a common oversight in maintenance strategy.

First, let me explain the situation (based on the pie-chart above). Over a two-year period, a fleet of long-haul aircraft experienced over 3,000 unscheduled maintenance events that were caused by almost 300 different systems. Ten systems caused a bit less than half of the unexpected maintenance events. The rest of the unscheduled maintenance (more than half) was the result of a failure in one of 270+ different aircraft systems. My premise is that airlines are already addressing the right-side of the pie chart but can do more to improve the left-side—responding to all those systems that fail rarely but, when taken together, account for the majority of unscheduled maintenance. (I discussed this topic a few weeks ago in my blog post titled: The Long Tail of Aircraft Maintenance.) Here is the (edited) question that was asked:

Focusing maintenance attention on 270+ systems will drive high volumes of action items within the organization, creating a great deal of confusion. Most process improvement techniques tell you to focus and fix the top 20% of your problems to drive performance. How can your approach work in a multi-department company?

The questioner is right to say that it is impractical to focus attention on 270+ different aircraft systems. There’s no way the mechanics on the flight line can master so much information (100K’s of pages). However, I would like to make two points:

1. The data highlights a problem with “conventional wisdom.” If maintenance focuses on the top 20% of problems then they will be focusing on just one aircraft system (700 failures) and there are many more systems that cause problems. Furthermore, if maintenance believes the 20/80 rule applies—claiming 20% of the systems cause 80% of the problems—then this isn’t supported by the data either.
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2. My recommendation has never been that maintenance should focus on 270+ problems. Rather, I believe that information systems should be implemented that help mechanics respond to all maintenance requirements, regardless of whether it is a Top 10 problem or a Long Tail problem.

Maintenance personnel are busy, so they have limited bandwidth. It is inevitable that they will focus on frequent problems—the trees not the forest. The point I am making is that the unscheduled maintenance problem is bigger than the Top 10 issues. Information technology now allows the flight line to become an extension of the enterprise, improving the efficiency and consistency with which mechanics respond to unscheduled maintenance. The key is to bring information to the mechanic, rather than making the mechanic chase down the information.

Download the 15-minute video below to see a brief explanation and demonstration of the Enigma InService Job Card Generator (JCG), presented by Susan Glass, Director of European Professional Services and Solutions at Enigma.

InService Job Card Generator (JCG) automates the production of job cards (task cards) containing all the technical information required for maintaining aircraft, engines and other complex equipment.

This product uses planning information from an M&E system (i.e. tail number/serial number, fleet, skill, zone, hours, material) with the relevant technical content (i.e. AMM tasks/sub-tasks, service bulletins, diagrams and schematics) resulting in a complete work package consisting of one or more job cards. This provides up-to-date information to the mechanic, filtered according to effectivity within the context of the job card, and formatted to the maintenance organization standard.

Key features include:

1. Dynamic rendition of a work package (consisting of a set of job cards)
2. Effectivity filtering of the most up-to-date technical content based on tail number/serial number
3. Manual or automatic job card production (directly from M&E system)
4. Rendering of job cards/work packages according to different rules/layouts
5. Ability to produce job cards centrally and distribute to remote users (electronic and/or printed job cards)
6. Merging of multiple datasets – planning information from the M&E system, technical information from the content management and product management systems
7. Extraction of job card information (number of pages in the job card/work package, job card filenames, location) which can be sent to the M&E system if required
8. Digital signature option.

Download the free InService JCG data sheet.

Because it’s that time of year when thoughts turn to shopping (for those of you in the United States, the infamous “Black Friday,” the shopping day after Thanksgiving, is just 7 days away!) it seems apropos to do a podcast that illustrates how easy it is for dealers to use the InService Electronic Parts Catalog shopping cart functionality to order OEM parts.

The InService EPC shopping center is user-friendly and intuitive; simply search by models, part number or name, create a shopping cart, then fill it up by selecting on parts. The Shopping List displays those parts being ordered by the user and is associated with a specific shopping cart. Users can update a shopping list by removing parts, changing quantities, or adding additional cataloged or non-cataloged parts. One can even create multiple shopping carts that can be defined and re-used to accelerate the creation and submission of parts orders.

The shopping cart also supports a variety of dealership information, such as a unique logo, billing address and shipping address that is included in each parts order, whether electronic or hard copy. In terms of e-commerce integration, dealers may be allowed to track their parts order by connecting to an eCommerce site from within the Enigma shopping center (access to the e-commerce site is dependent on the level of customer authorization.)

For more information, download our InService EPC fact sheet.

Happy shopping!

A few weeks ago I wrote about the importance of helping mechanics to fix rare problems faster—accelerating the repair of systems that don’t fail very often. Today’s post follows up on that theme as it relates to the aviation MRO industry. Because aircraft systems are generally quite reliable, when something fails unexpectedly it is called a non-routine event (NR). (It should be noted that aircraft systems have multiple redundancies, so an NR is not necessarily a cause for concern. But it still needs to be fixed.)

Non-routine events are a major source of unscheduled aircraft maintenance. (Other industries may refer to this as a break-fix event because something failed outside the normal maintenance schedule.) The question therefore is, “What to do about NRs?” The idea of planning for unscheduled maintenance seems like an oxymoron. After all, how can you plan for something that you can’t predict? And that is really the point; on any complex machine—and an aircraft is really complex—you know something is going to break, you just don’t know what it will be.

To explain the difficulty of the problem let’s look at some real customer data.  In a fleet of wide body, long-haul aircraft over a two-year period, an airline found that there were over 3,000 non-routine events that could be traced back to almost 300 different systems. 10 systems caused almost half of the NRs. (In fact, 1 system alone caused 20% of the NRs.) But the majority of the NRs (51%) were caused by failures in one of the other 270+ systems.

When this data is plotted on a graph (above) it is easy to see the trend. The top 10 causes of NRs occured much more frequently than the rest of the systems. (The number 1 cause needs unscheduled maintenance almost once a day and number 10 occurs at least every other week.) The rest of the systems in this study (97%) occurred an average of 4 times per year, forming a long tail on our statistical data. However, since the top 10 problems account for less than half of all non-routine events, if an airline wishes to reduce the overall impact of NRs, then it must address the long tail.

Several conclusions can be drawn from these numbers:
• Most of the systems on an aircraft are quite reliable. (Given the complexity of an airplane and the physical stresses it endures, this is a great testament to the aircraft manufacturers.)
• Mechanics can quickly gain experience fixing the top 10 causes of NRs.
• Mechanics do not gain significant experience fixing the other half of the NRs. (They just don’t see them often enough.)

A typical maintenance approach is to focus attention on the most frequent failures—the top 10. Training to fix the top 10 is pretty straight forward however, the long tail consists of many different problems that happen infrequently. (These are individual systems that rarely break but, when added together, account for the majority of the unscheduled maintenance.) The only way to deal with such a wide-ranging set of problems is to improve the mechanic’s ability to respond to the unknown. Better training is not the solution, automating information systems is.

It should be obvious but when time is tight and a repair is urgent it’s best to bring service information to the mechanic, rather than the other way around. This can be accomplished by integrating maintenance information systems with maintenance planning, inventory and other back-office systems to provide a fully integrated scheduling and execution environment. Then, no matter what type of problem the technician uncovers they can quickly obtain the information they need and begin the process of repair.

Along with our partner Oracle, I’ll be co-presenting an Air Transport World magazine webinar on this topic in a few weeks (December 9, to be specific); if you’d like to attend that webinar, sign up here.

The October 2008 issue of Air Transport World includes an article titled “Mechanics Wanted,” regarding the challenges of recruiting enough aviation service technicians to meet the future needs of the aviation industry. 

According to the article, the demand for aircraft maintenance technicians is expected to more than double in the next two decades, to support fleet growth and replace retiring technicians. This echoes what we’ve referenced in a previous blogs about the graying of the workforce and the need to accelerate the education of new service technicians.

Why can’t the industry recruit the number of technicians they need? First of all, it takes a long time to complete maintenance training, typically five years to be licensed to sign-off on repairs. Second, service technician jobs often don’t pay as well as other professions (both inside and out of the aviation industry). The opportunity to work on aircraft is just not appealing to enough people. 

To make matters worse, once recruits are in place it has become harder to train them because there aren’t enough planes on the ground to provide the hands-on experience they need. (This is a good thing for travelers but makes training a challenge.)

“It’s getting more and more difficult to get access to a real maintenance environment for training purposes because the planes are always in use, the maintenance schedule is getting tighter and tighter, ground time is getting shorter and shorter.” —Klaus Schmidt-Klyk, Director of Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service, Lufthansa Technical Training.

Since Enigma is in the business of reducing maintenance delays, we are happy to hear that aircraft uptime is increasing, and customers tell us that our aircraft maintenance solutions are part of that improvement. But we sympathize with the MRO shops and airline operators that are trying to train technicians and believe that technology plays a strong role in achieving further improvements.

I just returned from the 2008 ATA E-Business/ S1000D Forum in Budapest, Hungary. This was the first year that ATA (Air Transport Association) combined the E-Business and S1000D meetings. The resulting event concentrated more on authoring/tech pubs than on the aftermarket service and support focus of past years. Almost 300 people attended, which is larger than either of the two individual events in 2007 but smaller than the combined total from last year. It wasn’t clear to me if this drop-off was because of the location, the topics, or the economy.

This year’s event drew fewer airlines than last year (14) but those that attended were serious about improving maintenance processes and job cards. There were also many OEMs in attendance trying to learn how to implement the S1000D spec but a few wanted to learn how to improve customer support and field service through electronic catalogs. Enigma stood out as one of the only exhibitors solely focused on making service information usable to mechanics and technicians, and a number of airlines sought us out for a demo. Each one expressed an urgent need to reduce maintenance costs. So while the quantity of attendees was down, the quality seemed to be up.

One change from last year was an increase in the amount of competitive eavesdropping. I often noticed Boeing and Airbus people hovering around as I gave product demos. This was particularly amusing from Airbus because when they presented the A380 information system during one of the open sessions it looked a lot like the Enigma solution from 2002. However, during the presentation Airbus mentioned some problems around incremental updates so I guess they haven’t copied everything.

Regarding the event itself, ATA did a fantastic job planning and coordinating the location and the topics. The hotel was first-rate and the city was very pleasant, despite the fact that the Communists were marching to commemorate the failed 1956 Revolt and protesting all things democratic. (Perhaps that’s why my bag arrived home two days after I did.) For me, the whole event was a worthwhile adventure. I learned a few things that could improve our products, and I was able to meet potential customers and partners to discuss the business opportunities in the aviation aftermarket. Kudos to Brad Ballance and the ATA!

It’s a no-brainer that parts managers and service technicians need fast, easy access to the right parts and service information, all in a “one-stop-shop” application. In this mini-demo, I give you an overview of the multiple ways that one can search for parts and service information in the InService Electronic Parts Catalog (EPC).

When data is loaded into the EPC application, all of the content is indexed for fast and easy retrieval by the search system.  Click on the demo to see the following features:

Search All:  The Search All option looks for the desired text within all available sources of information: parts catalogs, maintenance manuals, product specs, sales collateral and any other information that has been included in the solution. This search option allows the use of conditional (Boolean) expressions such as “AND”, “OR” and ”NOT”.

Search Part:  The Search Part option looks for the desired text as a part number inside the illustrated parts catalog. This search option also allows the use of wildcard and truncation operators in the search field.

Search Center:  The Search Center provides the ability to perform more refined searches. This option allows unique search parameters for parts catalogs and product information, broken down by product type, family and model as well as part number, description and free text.

Search Results:  The Search Results display a list of links to information that matches the search criteria. The user can sort the search results by a particular column or filter the search results by applying a specific product model.

MRO Asia 2008 concluded today in Singapore. Here are some of my impressions from this year’s show:
 
1. The prevailing mood was definitely on the somber side. Every speaker mentioned the “financial crisis” or “market turmoil” at some point or other in his/her speech, some more than once. The presentation from the Association of Asia Pacific Airlines (AAPA) included one slide that had several bullet points all saying, in diffferent words: “expect bad times ahead, we have no idea what to expect”. The continuously falling oil price was small consolation in the general feeling of uncertainty.
 
2. The exhibition floor was comparable in size to last year’s show in Shanghai, but some of the players in the MRO IT space were conspicuously absent. While most of the best-of-breed MRO providers were there, Swiss Aviation Software was absent. The two “gorillas” in this space - SAP and Oracle - were also absent, although Axon Global was there, with their new iMRO offering, which basically is to replace SAP MRO. From the content delivery players, OpenConnent was not there. Perhaps the European players do not view Asia as a market they need to invest in.
 
3. As for the attendees, most Asian airlines and many of the non-Asian ones, were represented. However, there seemed to be fewer delegates compared to last year, definitely fewer representatives from Chinese airlines. I know for a fact that one of the airlines planned to send five senior delegates but, with the recent upheavals in the world economy, decided at the last minute to cancel the trip and send two junior delegates instead.

4. Any vendor that attends a major show like MRO Asia carefully monitors the topics that customers and prospects want to discuss. In this regard, Enigma InService Job Card Generator drew a lot of attention from attendees. It is clear that airlines and MROs view the ability to provide intelligent job cards quickly and easily as a key component to accelerating maintenance. Several airlines were seeking even greater automation, and took great interest in Enigma InService MRO. In this regard, it was nice to have important customers, like KLM, at the show that can verify the cost reductions and productivity improvements that are available through advanced technology.
 
Next year’s show is in Hong Kong. See you all there!

A few years ago I met with a customer service executive (Bill) from a well-known office equipment manufacturer. Over the course of several months we had a really good discussion regarding the best ways to improve field service. During this time Bill shared the service statistics for one of his products, which reflected the data I’ve seen in many other industries. What surprised me was the way he interpreted these statistics. Here’s what he found:

1. Over an 8-month period, one product line received 5591 service calls
2. Those calls were the result of 423 different fault codes
3. The top 20 fault codes accounted for 50% of all service calls
4. The other 403 fault codes (95% of total) were responsible for the rest of the service calls
5. Each of those 403 fault codes occurred no more than 51 times. (In fact, 364 fault codes—86%—were tripped 20 times or less.)

Bill told me his company was trying to improve service by focusing on the most common problems—the top 20 fault codes—but he thought this was the wrong approach. He believed the top 20 problems didn’t pose an issue for most technicians because they repaired them so often. It was the other 50% of the calls that made life difficult.

The key to understanding Bill’s perspective can be found in the last two bullets—half of the service calls involved fault codes that occur less than 1% of the time. (In fact, 140 service calls involved fault codes that only occurred once.) Therefore, field technicians got little or no experience repairing these rare problems. Further analysis showed these service calls often took more than two hours to resolve and were at the heart of scheduling delays and blown response times.

Bill felt that the real key to improving customer service was not faster repairs for well-known problems but a more consistent approach to all problems. He said that once he changed his focus from 20 fault codes to 423, he realized the answer was not to streamline call handling, travel, part lookup or closeout but rather it was improving information access in general. If his service teams had an integrated parts and service information system they could address any fault code efficiently and consistently.

Recently, Bill told me his company never did act on his advice and he subsequently left the firm. He realized that a slick new call-center gets more political traction than a system to support field service engineers. After all, a tour of the call center was a great selling tool during customer visits. Unfortunately, at the end of the day it’s those same customers that suffer the results of this decision.

The September 19 issue of AftermarketNews reported, “A hot debate has ensued as to whether the industry ever can, or should, get rid of paper cats. The results of NCMA’s recent survey of counter professionals shows usage of paper versus electronic remains nearly tied, with paper catalogs at 86 percent and e-cats at 84 percent.” That research came from the National Catalog Managers Association (NCMA), which is a professional society within the Automotive Aftermarket Industry Association (AAIA). The data showed that 86 percent of parts counter professionals use manufacturers’ paper catalogs, 84 percent use full-line electronic catalogs, 70 percent use manufacturers’ web catalogs and 32 percent use manufacturers’ CDs.

The following week, September 26, the e-zine  did a follow-up report, which asked parts professionals where they turn initially to look up parts information.  Not surprisingly, it turns out that parts pros go to an electronic parts catalog a whopping 90% of the time; they resort to flipping through the pages of a paper OEM catalog only if they can’t find what they need in the electronic parts catalog. This makes sense, since the world has grown accustomed to searching for information online.

We at Enigma see a growing demand for our electronic parts catalog software, not only because it makes life easier for parts managers, but because it makes it easier for manufacturers to create, distribute and update parts and service information to their dealer networks and distributors.

Scott Luckett, vice president, technology standards and solutions for the AAIA, had this to say:  “When parts professionals first turn to the electronic source 90 percent of the time, shouldn’t parts manufacturers allocate 90 percent of their cataloging resources into this medium? If electronic catalog content got 90 percent of the attention and resources, it wouldn’t be long before paper catalogs were truly obsolete.”

Thanks Scott, for that ringing endorsement of electronic part catalogs!  We agree that when it comes to part catalogs, electronic is the way to go if possible. But we also realize that not every part manager, service technician or dealer has reliable internet access, so the Enigma software makes it possible to distribute parts catalogs via DVD or paper. Furthermore, when technical information needs to be printed out the electronic catalog will automatically provide it in a consistent and usable format. Maybe “paper cats“ (gee, I like that phrase!) will go on the endangered species list in the next few years. In this case it won’t be a bad thing, but for the time being it is important to offer our customers multiple options and maximum flexibility.

An article in the August issue of Airline Procurement Magazine discusses the challenges of responding to aircraft-on-ground (AOG) events. An AOG is described as any equipment-related event that prevents an aircraft from being dispatched. (This means that bad weather doesn’t count as an AOG.) The article points out that an AOG event results in lost revenue, higher maintenance costs and decreased passenger commitment. Because the impact of an AOG is so great, finding ways to minimize the impact is critical.

If you think the previous paragraph merely states the obvious, I agree. The article fails to discuss any of the means used by airlines to minimize the impact of AOGs. That’s a shame because there is a lot of software out there that can address various aspects of the AOG problem. Whether it is troubleshooting/fault isolation, parts identification, scheduling service, or inventory management, there are many pieces of technology that can help solve this puzzle.

Those of you not in the aviation industry may be wondering if this matters to you. It does. Every industry has some version of an AOG. Whether the crane stops hoisting, the excavator stops digging, the combine stops harvesting or the top drive stops turning, when production comes to a standstill companies will spend whatever it takes to get up-and-running again.

It may never be possible to eliminate AOGs. Sooner or later everything breaks, sometimes without warning. Smart companies however, find ways to guard against such risks and to reduce the cost of emergency maintenance and repairs. Maintenance software that can be fully integrated with other enterprise systems ensures that accurate information flows seamlessly, which is the key ingredient for good maintenance decisions and rapid response.

This Airline Procurement article highlighted several aspects of a serious problem—a problem that affects every industry. Now it’s time to start discussing solutions.

By Michael Israel
Founder, IgniteService
www.ignite-service.com

Having worked in the application software industry for more than 25 years, I know that certain fundamental elements must exist if both the software vendors themselves and their customers are to be successful.  The first and most obvious is that the software must satisfy the customers’ business requirements.  For example, you wouldn’t purchase inventory management software that was unable to keep track of your on-hand balances. 

A second crucial element is technology.  With the Internet permeating nearly everything we do these days, it’s not likely you would deploy a solution that didn’t take full advantage of Web technology.  And if your business involves mobile workers, as is nearly always the case with field service, you’ll certainly want to be sure you select software that includes state-of-the-art synchronization and wireless connectivity features.

So functionality and technology are important considerations in selecting a software solution.  An equally important factor, though, is the software vendor’s ability to help their customers implement the software, and integrate the software to other applications, such as back-office ERP systems.

Unfortunately, this crucial element isn’t always given adequate consideration during vendor evaluations.  As I said, I’ve been in the software business for a long time.  I’ve seen software implementations stretch far beyond what was expected or, worse, fail entirely because of poor implementation planning and execution.

For an electronic parts catalog (EPC) software deployment, this implementation planning may be even more important than it is for other types of software deployment.  I say that because EPC software relies heavily on data obtained from many diverse sources.  For example, parts drawings come from engineering, service information is generated by technical publications, service bulletins are created by technical support, part substitution updates are issued by engineering or manufacturing, and so on.  An experienced and skilled implementation team can help the customer identify all the various sources within their company from which information can be drawn to populate the EPC database.

Moreover, an experienced implementation team can integrate EPC software to the customer’s ERP, inventory control, e-commerce, and other legacy applications, giving the users a streamlined workflow, which saves them the aggravation of having to navigate between  screens  or applications to accomplish a single task.

A word of caution, however; don’t think the burden for a smooth implementation rests only with the software vendor.  It belongs equally to the customer.  Strong customer executive sponsorship and a willingness to commit the necessary resources to the implementation project are essential for success to be achieved.

OEMs want to sell more parts to their dealer networks, and the dealers want a simple way to order parts; therefore, it’s not surprising that the shopping cart features of Enigma InService Electronic Parts Catalog are highly valued by our customers because they help dealerships order OEM parts easily. The following podcast demonstrates how shopping carts contain information such as part number and description, price, quantity, and notes/comments, as well as dealership information (such as the dealership’s unique logo and billing/shipping addresses.)

Enigma InService EPC customers usually integrate their shopping carts with a back-office e-commerce system, which facilitates parts order tracking and fulfillment. The carts can be viewed online, emailed to someone, or printed out as a PDF file.  The shopping list displays those parts being ordered by the user and is associated with a specific shopping cart. The shopping list can be updated by removing parts, changing quantities, or adding additional cataloged or non-cataloged parts.

Keep in mind that the shopping cart functionality allows specific customer information and parts requisition activities to be standardized. Each shopping cart includes information specific to each customer and/or type of order. Multiple shopping carts can be defined and re-used to accelerate the creation and submission of parts orders.

Take a peek at the product podcast and let us know what you think. If you want to see more, I’d be happy to set up a thorough web demo for you.

Recently, I was drawn into a debate regarding the future of offline applications. (For my purpose, an offline application is one that continues to operate properly even when disconnected from the network.) The person I was debating took the position that offline applications will vanish within two years as Web-based and SaaS applications grow in popularity. Furthermore, they contended that current/real-time data is the only data of any real import to business. As a result, this person claimed that offline capabilities for software applications were truly unnecessary. I disagree and firmly believe that offline applications will actually flourish in the future. Using the maintenance environment as a background, I will explain why:

1. Connectivity is not pervasive. No matter how much the wireless and cable companies want us to believe that the world will be fully-connected in the not-too-distant future, a large portion of the world will remain disconnected. Whether the connection is wireless or wired, access to the network is dependent on the number of customers that will pay for it. (Anyone that has driven through a rural/remote area can tell you how unreliable the cell-phone connection can be.) Furthermore, when it comes to fixing equipment, mechanics must often work in poor conditions where network cables are unavailable and wireless is slow and/or nonexistent. (Think about weather-related outages; isn’t it funny how often networks fail at the worst time possible?) Failover is critical to customer support and so having a disconnected-mode is key to delivering services in the real world.

2. Offline processing, online storage. In all things, performance is critical and offline processing leverages the power of the workstation, providing faster results. (This is especially true when problems and solutions are unclear, requiring multiple iterations to properly identify and resolve.) Once complete, results can be uploaded/synchronized to online repositories for use by other users.

3. Backup and archiving. In any regulated industry, companies often choose to save older versions of maintenance information, which provides a snapshot to a point in time. In the case of a recall or investigation, the ability to restore or view maintenance history is invaluable.

4. Intellectual property. Offline applications allow local storage of proprietary information that must always be at hand. This is critical for collecting maintenance notes and best-practices, where user-generated content can only be understood within the context of the specific equipment configuration and service procedures that were being performed. This is also important for field engineers that service multiple clients and must guard proprietary data from exposure.

5. Connectivity costs. Unless information changes daily (hourly?) it doesn’t make sense to make online access exclusive. Given the volume of data required to service complex equipment, local/offline applications make perfect sense.
 
Enigma is not the only company to recognize the importance of offline applications. I see a trend of classic web applications developing frameworks that enable them to work in offline mode and combine desktop and internet functionality: 

1. Google Gears
2. Adobe Air
3. Ebay (Perhaps the biggest web application ever, Ebay developed a desktop/offline application for power users.)
4. Wikipedia offers DVD and offline downloading.

The issue can be further highlighted using this simple metaphor; in a world that has reliable public transportation systems, people still use cars. A sense of security and predictability are what influence companies to retain control over maintenance data through the use of offline applications. The pendulum has shifted many times from the days of mainframe computing to desktop applications, to client (fat) and server applications, and back to the web and back again. Offline and online applications have survived the test of time, each for different reasons. It appears there will always be room for both.

We all know it’s been a difficult year for commercial aviation. Given that oil is $115 per barrel and, in an atmosphere of mergers, acquisitions, and a weak dollar, many airlines have reduced their fleets, laid off employees, imposed baggage fees and taken other measures to stem revenue loss.

A recent blog post on Airline World regarding the state of the industry is positive that the sky is falling (pun intended). Its headline shouts, “Oil Crisis in the Airline Industry!” and the text of the blog highlights just about every piece of bad news that the writer could muster for his argument—specifically highlighting the massive job cuts and fleet groundings in North America. That headline may be a great way to draw attention but it seems a bit disingenuous to educated readers.

In contrast, the August 28 issue of the Aviation News e-newsletter (sorry, it’s not on the Web so I can’t link to it) shared a rather upbeat perspective regarding the aircraft manufacturing industry. The article cites a report by the International Bureau of Aviation, a UK-based consulting firm. According to Aviation News, IBA has concluded that “the aviation market is cyclical and despite downturns and external pressures, is resilient and should continue to grow albeit at a slower rate.”

The Aviation News article includes a complete list of reasons for optimism, but here are a few of the big factors:
• Today’s cycle is different as the order book is not heavily relying on the US operators, and demand for commercial aircraft is becoming more diverse geographically.
• Manufacturers, industry associations and other bodies are consistently forecasting a growth in the aviation market of between five and six per cent in the medium-term.
• Record new aircraft orders were placed by the airline industry between 2005 and 2007.
• The number of parked aircraft had stopped rising and is showing some signs of reducing.

From Enigma’s perspective, the future of the aviation market is murky but not bleak. There are two sides to commercial aviation, the manufacturers and the carriers. Evaluating each shows reasons for optimism as well as concern, but it seems clear that the sky is not falling.

Yes, there are severe economic challenges for the commercial aviation industry, particularly in North America and Europe. It’s also true that the cost of oil hurts all carriers, regardless of the geography they serve. However, the Asia-Pacific market continues to grow (albeit a bit slower). As for North America and Europe, once the economy adjusts to the new cost of transportation the demand for airline transport, whether for people or goods, is likely to rebound and grow rather than shrink.

Manufacturing Business Technology recently announced its MBT 2008 Innovation Insight Awards, and among them was an Honorable Mention for Advanced Technology Services (ATS), a company that provides maintenance and repair services for manufacturing plants.

ATS received the kudos because they deployed Knowledgebase—their own proprietary database of processes, procedures and best practices for their field service technicians. What is interesting is that much of the content in this custom application came from the technicians themselves. Knowledgebase helps ATS to fix equipment faster, thereby reducing their customers’ downtime.

Here at Enigma we agree wholeheartedly with capturing and reusing technical expertise, which is why our products such as InService MRO, InService EPC and the Enigma 3C Platform all include a feature called eNotes. (For a mini product demo of this feature, see our August 15 podcast post.) 

While service manuals may contain some previously established best practices or proprietary techniques, eNotes allow mechanics to insert new comments connected to the original content. This lets companies capture feedback on-the-fly and also gives context to the comments because they are linked to the specific task that was being performed. eNotes are also available to other users (based on authorization/distribution rules). This makes it easy for other mechanics to learn from their peers and for OEMs to update documentation so that it reflects real world experience.

But it’s not just eNotes that make Enigma products useful; our products aggregate and deliver all product content in one place, in ways that streamline the entire maintenance execution process. The ability for service technicians to use a single application to pull relevant OEM information, whether parts information or service manuals, from multiple sources, is a tremendous advantage in the field or the service depot. The description of ATS’ Knowledgebase is impressive, but it sounds like an expensive solution. What is more impressive is that, today, any company can provide similar capabilities using Enigma’s out-of-the-box solutions.

In this mini-demo of the InService Electronic Parts Catalog (EPC), Enigma Solution Specialist Rob Bannerman gives an overview of the eNote feature. 

The eNotes functionality enables parts managers and service technicians to collaborate by creating personal notes and comments within the InService EPC application. The user can create eNotes at several levels: on assemblies or individual parts for the full parts catalog, on individual parts in a specific parts catalog (by serial number), and on maintenance manuals, product specs, sales collateral, and other product information. These eNotes are then available for reference whenever the relevant application or maintenance information is displayed.  An eNote can be added publicly or privately, and users can also search under eNotes to find parts and assembly information.

Please click on the pop-up player to see this 2-minute demonstration.

I thought of giving this blog post the title, “Yeah, what he said!” That’s how strongly I feel about the comments made by Scott Luckett at the 2008 Aftermarket eForum. Mr. Luckett is the vice president of Technology Standards and Solutions at the Automotive Aftermarket Industry Association, so he is probably well qualified to speak on the topic of electronic data and the automotive aftermarket. His premise is that the lack of accurate electronic data is increasing the cost of doing business. I agree.

The problem is that Mr. Luckett oversimplifies a number of issues. He wants all aftermarket automotive data to be electronic. But what does that mean, what format should it be in? Should it be PDF, XML, Word? He talks as if getting the data into an electronic format and following certain standards is the answer. It’s not that simple. For example, the aerospace industry has strict data standards but that has not helped them achieve the electronic nirvana that Mr. Luckett envisions. Even though every aerospace manufacturer adheres to the same standards, the data still doesn’t integrate well. The problem of data interoperability is even worse in the automotive industry where there are more OEMs, more suppliers and fewer standards. The vast number of brands and trim packages ensures that agreement on standards, and how to interpret them, is a long way off.

The key to interoperability is not the data, but the software that uses that data. Mr. Luckett properly points out that Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) is the key technology for reliable interoperability. This is especially true for electronic parts catalogs (EPC), the starting point for most parts and service activity. Because of the difficulty in establishing usable data standards, the Automotive Aftermarket Industry Association (AAIA) should spend its’ time advocating that OEMs move to electronic data using SOA. This would help OEMs realize the benefits that modern technology brings to the aftermarket, without waiting for standards to be finalized. Such a strategy would simplify the deployment of innovative solutions that improve part selection and increase first time fix rates (FTFR), which benefits the customer, the OEM and the dealer. Furthermore, such a strategy helps preserve one of the OEMs’ chief worries—protecting intellectual property.

I’m looking forward to my first visit to Budapest, Hungary, not only to sample the goulash but to attend the ATA e-Business Forum in October.  If your company has any responsibility for aircraft maintenance, it’s worth sending someone to this event. I’ve been focusing on aftermarket service and support technology for eight years, but last year was my first ATA e-biz show and I have to tell you, the people that attended impressed me. They knew their stuff and were very involved in the technical sessions. What I really liked was that they wouldn’t let the speakers give easy answers to hard questions.

Of course it wouldn’t be an aviation technology event without the inevitable hype regarding S1000D and how it’s changing the world. There were plenty of vendors trying to convince airlines, MROs and OEMs to buy their solution and get a jump on the competition in moving to the new standard. But in between all the hype, there were a lot of people talking about how to improve the use of information they already had, without S1000D. (For the record, Enigma is a strong supporter of S1000D but we think airlines, MROs and OEMs need solutions that work with legacy data as well.) These people understood that at the end of the day, even though the new standard holds a lot of promise, it will take years (decades?) to get all the relevant information converted. After all, we’re talking about Terabytes (Petabytes? Exabytes?) of information and in the meantime the airlines, MROs and OEMs have businesses to run.  

With that in mind, many of the people attending ATA e-biz were more interested in how to improve their business processes today…with the assurance of supporting S1000D tomorrow. These people wanted to accelerate job card processes, to ensure maintenance crews have the right information all the time, every time. They were looking for ways to improve non-routine job card processes, so that aircraft maintenance could stay on schedule, or ahead of schedule. They wanted to improve the efficiency and consistency of one of their largest workforces.

The people I met were realists who understood that, for their current fleets, it will be a long-long time before all the maintenance manuals, repair manuals, engine manuals, component manuals, illustrated parts catalogs, service bulletins, technical revisions, planning documents, equipment lists, schematics and other configuration information is converted to the new format (if ever). All the airline folks agreed that S1000D was gaining acceptance with the 787 and A380 (some, not all of the manuals will be S1000D) but that didn’t help them with the rest of their Boeing, Airbus, Bombardier, Embraer, ATR, Fokker, BAE, GE, Pratt & Whitney, Rolls-Royce, CFM, IAE and Honeywell fleets.

The best thing about ATA e-biz is that a lot of really good issues, that seem to be hidden but have far-reaching consequences, are brought under the microscope, inspected, discussed and in some cases resolved. What I learned from last year’s ATA e-biz was that it’s a bunch of smart people having honest discussions about applying technology to current maintenance issues and future business opportunities. I hope this year’s event is just as good.

In asset-intensive industries like oil & gas, energy & utilities, mining and transportation, capital equipment downtime can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per day. One of the primary challenges to keeping assets up and running is the daunting complexity and various configurations of the equipment: maintenance planners and service technicians must reference enormous volumes of documentation, some of which is spread across multiple locations; some in paper form, others in online databases.

Many companies in asset-intensive industries have made substantial investments in Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) systems or Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS). While these systems can have a wide range of capabilities, broadly speaking they try to improve maintenance planning by indicating what to do and when to do it. This often includes job scheduling and assignment, preventive maintenance (PM), inventory control, and other activities associated with asset availability, reliability and operational safety.

Largely beyond the scope of EAM/CMMS applications is direct support for how to perform maintenance activities—particularly unplanned maintenance activities—in the field. While some EAM systems can generate work orders, and perhaps material lists for various maintenance tasks, the primary purpose of these systems is to support the maintenance planner, not the mechanic.

That’s where Enigma’s technology comes into play, because it delivers the how to content as a fully integrated maintenance solution: fault isolation/troubleshooting manuals (how to diagnose), service manuals (how to repair), service bulletins (how to incorporate the latest procedures), parts catalogs (how to find the proper parts) and collaboration (how to share maintenance history/experience). Improving the efficiency of mechanics has a major impact on reducing asset downtime and thus on bottom-line profitability and competitiveness; it’s common sense to increase the value of EAM by integrating Enigma into the equation. In future blog posts we’ll provide specific examples that show companies how to further leverage EAM/CMMS investments.